It says a lot about Laura Dern that she has allowed a deeply unflattering image of herself to be plastered across every subway station I have ventured into in New York this autumn. The publicity poster for Enlightened, the HBO comedy she both stars in and co-created, features only her face, up-close, snarling and mascara-smeared. It really doesn’t do Dern any justice.

In person, the 44-year-old actress, whose CV includes the Steven Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park as well as darker, David Lynch-directed classics such as Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, is as pretty as a Disney princess – and incredibly tall. As she sashays through the lobby of the Beverly Hills hotel in which we are meeting, her rangy legs atop a pair of skyscraper heels, she cuts quite the dash in a short purple and pink woollen shift dress. It’s not tricky to see what caught the eye of a long line of A-list ex-boyfriends including Nicolas Cage, Jeff Goldblum and Billy Bob Thornton, before she married musician Ben Harper six years ago.

When I mention the posters, she launches into an anecdote about her attractiveness, or otherwise, in the series, which begins tonight on Sky Atlantic and in which she plays Amy Jellicoe, a highly strung health and beauty buyer in a large California corporation, who has a very public and noisy meltdown.

“A male journalist said to me the other day that he watched one episode and thought I looked stunning and sexy. Then he watched another episode and his expression said it all – he thought I was the ugliest thing ever.” Dern beams broadly. “But that’s what I love,” she enthuses. “Being all of it. You want to run from this person, but you’re intrigued, and you want her to be your best friend, but then she ruins everything.”

Enlightened being an American-made, California-set series, Amy is shipped off by her firm to Hawaii, for some crystal-stroking, yoga-posing anger management therapy. Two months of meditation later, she returns home, her rage repackaged into evangelical zeal.

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“We’re not mocking her,” insists Dern, earnestly. “But she comes back from therapy saying, ‘I know, I’ll make this toxic American corporation eco-friendly, I’ll make my drug addict alcoholic ex-husband [played by Luke Wilson] sober, and I’ll make my mother a great person who always listens to me.’”

Her co-star Mike White, who also wrote the script for Enlightened, agrees. “I’m not completely making fun of therapy, because I’ve had my own nervous breakdowns, read self-help books, meditated and done yoga,” he admits. “But at the same time there are moments when you go to those kinds of places and you’re like, ‘What am I doing here?’.”

“Amy’s intentions are genuine but she has to tell the truth at all times,” Dern continues. “Which is not always a good idea in a corporation, or a love affair, or with your mother.” The truthfulness is a tendency she easily associates with though. “I’ve definitely felt misunderstood, as a woman, for saying what I feel,” she nods. “People have certainly told me: ‘Whoa, stop talking, don’t say this, don’t share that… or maybe in that interview you really shouldn’t discuss your political beliefs.’”

Quite clearly, Dern never heeded such advice, as she reveals the idea for Enlightened came from an issue close to her highly politicised heart. “I am intrigued by the widespread cultural apathy in America,” she says. “Over the last decade or so, I think people have felt that their voice was never going to be heard, so they haven’t even bothered trying.

“But I think people are getting angrier now and starting to use their voices more.”

Dern does seem to have tapped into the zeitgeist with this: a month after we meet in Los Angeles, protesters take over Zuccotti Park in New York, and Occupy Wall Street sparks an unprecedented nationwide movement calling for a change in the structure of society and the practices of big business.

But it is perhaps unsurprising that Dern has pinpointed an issue so ripe for dramatisation, possessing, as she does, a pedigree both political and theatrical. The daughter of actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, she is also the great-granddaughter of George Dern, former Utah governor and US secretary of war.

Her real-life mother Ladd, now 76, appears alongside her in Enlightened, playing Amy’s emotionally detached mother. “It’s the first time we’d worked together for a long time, and it was a lot of fun,” reports Dern (the pair previously co-starred in Wild at Heart in 1990 and Rambling Rose in 1991). “She’s extraordinary in the show and deeply passive-aggressive, which is very much not my mother.”

Her own alter-ego, Amy, however, has traits that Dern – a self-confessed fan of self-help books and Buddhist literature – admits she shares. “I can associate with her conflicts and complexities,” she nods. For all her right-on fervour, Dern sheepishly admits that today she is clad entirely in luxury label Prada. “Save the planet… and buy yourself a few nice dresses,” she laughs. She’s got a political point to make, but she’s not so po-faced as to renounce Prada in the process.